The Unobservant Fanatic

And do not kill yourselves, surely God is most Merciful to you.

Mohammed in the Koran.

The Prophet said, "He who commits suicide by throttling shall keep on throttling himself in Hell Fire and he who commits suicide by stabbing shall keep on stabbing himself in the Hell-Fire.

The Hadith.

It's now reported that Al Baghdadi followed the route of the great cowards who are comfortable with sending others to their deaths, but when the time comes for them to take up the sword, use it on themselves rather than bravely face the vagarities of real combat.  Al Baghdadi therefore turns out in the end to have just as much personal moral courage as Adolph Hitler, which wasn't much.  Getting somebody to storm the bunker for the Fatherland or for the Faith is one thing. . . doing it yourself, well that's quite another.

Hitler seemed to have that courage, we'd note, before he was a full blown racist hater.  In the Great War, serving under the Kaiser, he legitimately received an Iron Cross. But at that time he was a cog on the wheel of Imperial Germany.

And that's important to note.

Al Baghdadi has been hanging around in areas where he was at risk for a 500 lbs bomb whistling in any day, just like Hitler was at risk for a 75mm shell landing in the middle of his units dinner table.  But that isn't really the same as representing vast evil hatred, encouraging others to die for it, and then, when your turn comes, blowing yourself up or putting a pistol to your head.  If French Artillery sends one into your plate of brots and bread and blows you to atoms, or if an F-16 traveling so fast that by the time you'd hear it from where you are, you're already dead, gets you, well, that's not quite as scary as taking on, with deliberation, Ivan and his PPsh or Joe and his M4.

No, it isn't.

It's not, after all, as if these guys drew their Samurai swords, or perhaps more accurately for their place and time, their MP40s or AKMs, and said "follow me boys" and went to their deaths gun blazing.  No, they said "oh crap, my stupidity has run its course, I'm turning my back on everything, because I'm a big chicken bastard".

Hitler didn't show what the Ubermensch could do.

And Al Baghdadi didn't go down fighting either.  He didn't even go down as an  observant Muslim.

Mohammed never said that when your back was against the wall and the infidels coming in, well kill yourself.

No, he wouldn't have either.

And that's an important thing to note.

There's an odd fashion with fanatic movements to look back into an idealized past and imagine  yourself in a reconstructed future version of it, where you are nifty in the extreme and the glorified past is right there in front of you in its present glory. For Nazis, that meant that the good old Germany Aryans, who were never really like the Nazis imagined them, would be in the drivers seat and being all big and blond and whatever.  For people like Lenin, the good old working man would come into his own in a preternatural way and work would be cool, nifty and if Soviet Realism is any example, it would also apparently feature a lot of buxom blonds as well.  For people like Al Baghdadi, the centuries would roll back, a Caliphate would be created, and men would be in the driver's seat taking women as they pleased, apparently, who would be happy to receive them.

Odd.

And they were happy to have people fight for that.  They just weren't willing to fight themselves (with a bit of a pass for Lenin, who didn't kill himself after all).

There's something really narcissistic in all that.

And in Al Baghdadi's case, there's something deeply antithetical to his faith in it as well.  I'm certainly not a scholar of Islam and I'm also not a fan of it, but Muhammad did live at a time when prisoners of war didn't exist in the modern sense and slavery remained common.  I can't and won't sanction Islam's treatment of women, but I'm not really too sure that Muhammad, were he around today, would really be sanctioning enslavement of women for sexual purposes.  I doubt it.

And I'm sure he wouldn't sanction killing yourself.

Assuming that he'd approve of anything Al Baghdadi did, which is pretty doubtful, at the end he'd probably expect him to take up his sword and go down fighting.  This assumes that he wouldn't have found Al Baghdadi to be a scary nut in the first place, which is probably more likely.

A person's actions are, of course, a test of their belief.  And now we know.  As a Muslim, well. . . he could claim the title of Caliph with dubious qualifications, but he certainly didn't measure up in terms of radiance.